Snopes

One of the greatest resources on the net is Snopes. I used it today to debunk an email my wife received from a friend about a Facebook virus. The email was a little bogus and we confirmed this on snopes. It is go to place to confirm not only rumors about computer viruses but urban legends in general. Snopes was founded and still run by a married couple, Barbara and David Mikkelson. Factcheck.com recently reviewed Snopes' political links and they were deemed unbiased in regards to Bush, Palin and Obama.

Snopes.com gets its name from some lesser known novels by William Faulkner often called The Snopes Trilogy (The Hamlet, The Village and The Mansion). The Snopes are an unpleasant southern family. The patriarch Ab is a barn burner (are there any Faulkner works without a barn burner?), a sharecropper and a horse thief. I could find over 20 characters named Snopes in Faullker works referenced on several different web sites. Until today, I had not heard of any of them.